Whereas Alex Garland chose grand spectacle to tell the story of afractured America in Civil War, Sean Price Williams opts, in his first feature film The Sweet East, for a story on a human scale and a zany, offbeat vision of Americans that escapes judgment but not sarcasm. An LSD-free bad trip into a world of conspiracies (Pizzagate), fantasies and prejudices (neo-Nazi rallies), filmed through the adulescent eyes of Lillian(Talia Ryder).
During a school trip, the young high-school student runs away and follows the East Coast of the United States, from Delaware (SPW's home state) to Vermont via New York. In the course of her encounters, she discovers the mental, social and political fractures of the United States, filmed in the manner of a fairy tale or a variation on Alice in Wonderland - the actress revealing herself, from the very first scenes, with a song facing the mirror, ready to join Alice on the other side.
Imbued with freedom, the actress radiates in every scene, with this vibrant character of a young girl full of wonder, never disillusioned. So much so that she reaches beyond the edges of the frame, ready to taste everything life has to offer. Previously known as the Safdie brothers' cinematographer, Sean Price Williams succeeds brilliantly in depicting a country in the throes of a crisis of madness, where young punks on the town, a sentimental neo-Nazi who is surprisingly respectful and endearing, and electro-dancing Islamists mingle; all the while filming his lead actress with great gentleness.
A hallucinatory journey of initiation for the deceptively naive young Lillian, and for the viewer who discovers the face of an unknown and forgotten America, filmed through the eye of a director who makes his incredible visual poetry available. Navigating between a quasi-documentary vision, albeit aestheticized, and genuinely funny moments that arrive out of sequence (lunch on the grass on the arm of a Rohmerian neo-Nazi), The Sweet East is a cinematic gesture with a panache as flamboyant as that of its heroine.
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